ChatGPT Explained in Plain English

By now you have probably heard about ChatGPT. But you may be wondering what it is exactly and how you can use it right now.

Perhaps you feel like so many people are talking about it that you should already have an idea of what it is. Or perhaps you read an article about ChatGPT, and the article used terms like deep learning, large language model, and natural language processing and you didn’t get much from the explanation.

You are probably in good company. ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022, and many people are currently exploring how to use it effectively. Background and context in plain English may help you understand how to explore it and how you might leverage this powerful technology in your work.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a technology that can read some provided text and respond with text answers that seem like they were written by a human. It was developed by a company called OpenAI.

ChatGPT is able to read and respond to text like a human because it was specifically designed to have human-like qualities. The GPT in the name ChatGPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, which a technical description for the methods used to develop the technology with large amounts of text, such as books, articles, and websites, in order to make the technology read and write with human-like qualities.

There are other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies besides ChatGPT that use similar methods. One reason these technologies are drawing a lot of attention is because they can generate new text that is similarly high in quality. And these technologies can be used for a variety of tasks, such as language translation, chatbots, and text completion.

How You Can Use ChatGPT Right Now

You can interact with ChatGPT by visiting its public website where it is made available for free. You will need to create an account in order to use it. On the website you use a text box to enter a prompt, such as a question or a request. The popularity of ChatGPT means that sometimes traffic on the website is very heavy, so it might not be available unless you choose to upgrade to a paid plan or wait until the website is less busy.

You can follow up on your original question or request in an ongoing thread, and ChatGPT maintains the continuity of the conversation by keeping track of your previous prompts in the thread. Carrying on in this way can allow you to get more specific or refined in your requests, yielding surprisingly informative and insightful results.

When you interact with ChatGPT, the responses are generated by the technology’s ability to predict what words or phrases are most likely to come next in the conversation. ChatGPT’s predictive capability is the result of probabilities and structures that were identified in the large amounts of text it was initially trained on. ChatGPT breaks down your prompt into smaller parts, and uses its models and procedures to guess the best next word over and over in its response.

In addition to using elaborate models and procedures, ChatGPT uses an element of randomness to make the responses seem more novel and creative.

Why is ChatGPT important?

ChatGPT is important for many reasons. It represents significant progress in the fields of AI that relate to using language.

Many prior technologies that use language, such as Siri and Alexa, require questions to be simple, direct, and properly structured in order to get a meaningful response. With ChatGPT, however, you can write your questions or requests in a wide variety of ways and it is good at guessing the context and providing a useful response.

This improved capability has the potential for wide-ranging applications across industries and makes the technology more accessible to more people. The increase in usefulness and availability of the technology means that people may find more ways to use it in their daily lives and in their work.

Using AI more raises important ethical and societal questions. The model is trained on data from the internet without explicit permission from the people who originally published that information, which raises legal questions about rights and ownership of its responses. ChatGPT and similar technologies may also have negative impacts on individual privacy.

Also content on the internet includes the biases of people who published that information. Training AI models on that data means that the model will include certain types of bias as well, and the bias may not be obvious.

There is also potential for some people to lose their jobs if certain skillsets, such as marketing and customer service are disrupted in the near term. Accounting, legal, and medical professionals could find their work disrupted as well. On the other hand, they could also improve their productivity by using AI. Many questions about the future remain.

How can advisors use ChatGPT?

Today advisors and other professionals can use ChatGPT in a number of different ways. Here are some ways I've used ChatGPT recently for work:

In each case, I had to provide important context for the AI initially and then refine my questions and requests further in multiple back-and-forth exchanges with ChatGPT. Skills for using ChatGPT more effectively include: developing useful prompts, interpreting ChatGPT’s responses, and redirecting ChatGPT with additional prompts.

In the near future, CPAs and other advisors may be able to use ChatGPT and similar applications for tasks such as data entry and analysis, and to provide personalized responses to clients and colleagues.

Let me know what you try!